Sitting is one of the most common positions of human beings. As reported by public media, people will typically sit about six hours per day in their daily lives, and specific sitting positions are related to a number of health issues, such as back pain. Sitting position monitoring is receiving increasingly more attention due to its extensive applications and large impact in a number of domains, such as biomedicine (e.g., rehabilitation evaluation in chronic diseases), health education (e.g., correct sitting position for back pain prevention), human computer interface (e.g., real-time sitting position analysis for gaming), and facility design (e.g., furniture fitness evaluation).
Sleeping is another one of the most common positions of human beings, with people spending about seven or eight hours sleeping on average in their daily lives. Pressure ulcers have become a serious problem for paralyzed and other mobility-impaired patients, who tend to spend increased time in bed and can be affected by skin breakdown. An efficient approach to prevent ulcers is to make patients comfortable by changing their sleeping positions frequently. To achieve this goal, it is desirable to monitor sleeping positions of the patients, and alert nurses or other healthcare practitioners to change their sleeping positions in a timely fashion.
In order to monitor sitting or sleeping position accurately and reliably, attempts have been made to use sensors to extract posture information. Intuitively, it might be expected that a camera is a straightforward way to extract posture information by image capture. However, a camera can render patients uncomfortable because it can record other information that impacts personal privacy, especially when the patients are sleeping. Compared to a camera, a pressure sensor is more economical and more readily deployed. However, pressure sensors are commonly manufactured from piezoelectric crystals or ceramics, such as quartz, which can be obtrusive and uncomfortable for daily use.
It is against this background that a need arose to develop the apparatus, system, and method described herein.